1. Field of the Invention
One or more aspects of the invention generally relate to computer graphics, and more particularly to rasterizing graphics primitives without necessarily computing per-pixel samples.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional graphics processors are exemplified by systems and methods developed to rasterize graphics primitives by computing per-pixel samples. Increasingly, graphics applications operate in a variety of differing rendering regimes that have different memory bandwidth needs and different rasterization requirements. For example, portions of a graphics application may render geometry with complex shaders, wherein rendering performance is dominated by per-pixel color value computations. Memory bandwidth may limit the rendering performance when multiple textures are used by the complex shaders. Other portions of the graphics application may render occluder depth values, stencil shadow volumes, or large background polygons using either a trivial shader or no shader. The rendering performance for these portions of the graphics application may be limited by rasterization rates, particularly when a high number of samples are used per-pixel. The available memory bandwidth may be underutilized, particularly when compression is used without a shader or with a trivial shader.
Accordingly, there is a need for rasterization performance to increase when rendering performance is not limited by shading computations.